


Needs Must When the Devil Drives

by 1863



Category: The Lost Art of Twilight - Thomas Ligotti (Short Story)
Genre: Descent Into Darkness, Extra Treat, Gen, Pastiche, Post-Canon, Trick or Treat: Trick, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27278500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1863/pseuds/1863
Summary: Some memories never fade, no matter how much you may want them to.
Relationships: Narrator & Aunt T, Narrator & the Duvals
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Needs Must When the Devil Drives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/gifts).



I do not remember the beauty of twilight.

There was a time when I remembered everything, every moment of every day of every year, from birth all the way up until — whatever this is now. But as the nights go on — and they do go on, endlessly, endlessly — the more I struggle to remember.

There was a time when it was an obsession of mine, the twilight; when I loved its abstract, transitory tones and its indistinct, blurred-away edges. I felt that it reflected my own in-between existence, as one neither here nor there, neither alive nor dead. I _saw_ it, you see, I experienced it — the abstract as a concrete reality, the sheer washes of colour and pools of shade almost as tangible and corporeal as my own body.

But now, there is nothing but the night. These long and endless and ravening nights, one after another after another, and which indeed I will never run out of, as long as I take my fill. And I always take it, always, always; sometimes with great finesse but more and more often with none at all. It’s difficult, sometimes, to recall why I once chose to take such great care — why I would let one woman pass by but not another, why one man warranted a measure of gentleness while another received anything but. 

After all, the end result never changes. Blood is blood and hunger is hunger, and faces and flesh and skin and bone all look the same in the dark. 

Words — the words of the living, that is — have at least stayed with me. For how much longer, I cannot tell, but I do hope it’s for some time yet. The Duvals must have lost them a very long time ago, if indeed they ever possessed them at all; they know only the speech of the dead now, the guttural rasps and choking rhythms that I too am now fluent in, that I too am now bound by. And it _is_ a binding, a trap of soulless syllables in a profane patois, which when spoken form a curse of decay, of decomposition, of rot. With every word I utter, I know I am pulled further and further into a quagmire I will never escape from — as long as I take my fill. 

And I always take it, always. How can I not? The hunger is all-encompassing, all-consuming, always at the forefront of my thoughts. It is a physical pain, a mental torture, an entity that demands to be sated with a ferocity that cannot be denied. 

But I digress. And I lie. 

The hunger is not separate from me. I am not a slave to it and it is not my master. We are as one: the manifestation of one is the existence of the other, and around and around in circles we go. I am hunger, I am thirst; I am death, I am immortality. I am the devourer as I am the devoured. 

I mean this, of course, in the metaphorical sense. The Duvals no longer drink from me; I am as empty and dry a husk as they are, with not a drop to spare. I mean that I am as devoured by my hunger as I devour the blood of the people that I hunt. I mean that there is no real distinction between the former and the latter, that their edges blur and soften — just as my precious twilights once did! — as I drink, and drink, and drink. In the end, I do this because I have to. I do this because I have no choice. I do this because in the end, there is only the hunger. And somewhere, buried deep but surfacing, surfacing, I do this because I've begun to enjoy it. 

So I take my fill. Always, always. I learned to melt into shadows and creep around corners; to crawl, sticky and limacine, along the edges of the living’s perception. I am reminded of a man I think I once knew, on whom I forced a name that was not his own. Whose death-mask of a face used to disturb me, but whose shuffling, cadaverous gait I must now emulate, should anyone ever see me when I am not in my truest form.

I am not so far gone that I fail to see the irony in this. At times, it almost makes me laugh. 

Wherever he is, I hope that he feels some measure of schadenfreude at my expense. It’s the least I can offer when I cannot even remember his name — his real one, nor the one I foisted upon him. It’s the least I can offer, given what must have befallen him.

And this, perhaps, is the thing I remember best. The last day of my life, such as it was, and the first day of my death, such as it now is.

The silence that enveloped the entire house, heavy as the thickest fog, stifling as the most humid summer’s day. I didn’t know it at the time but now I recognise it for what it was: the sound of cessation, the sound of nothingness, the sound of the complete absence of life. I remember the undeniable sense of things being not _quite_ right, the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that, in a fantastically cruel twist, is so similar to what it feels like to be hungry. 

And I am always, always hungry.

But most of all, I remember walking into the dining room and seeing Aunt T. The stringy bits of flesh that clung to her bones like tinsel thrown carelessly across a Christmas tree. The gnawed remnants of what was left of her face, just enough left intact to make it impossible to deny what that butchered pile of gore once was. Who it was. The tatters of her crimson suit — or was it crimson, I now wonder? Perhaps it had been white, once, before the Duvals came down for dinner. Perhaps they’d made it quick. Perhaps she hadn’t died screaming and that’s why I hadn’t woken up, why I slept through the slaughter they wrought in the night, that night and every night since —

But I digress. And I lie. 

It is now, once again, night time. Twilight has passed me by and the darkness now calls to me. My family now calls to me. And the hunger… the hunger grips me like a vise. 

Yes, I lied before. 

The truth is, after the Duvals welcomed me back to the fold and drank me desert-dry, they took me back to the dining room again.

The truth is, the second time I saw it, I was barely aware of Aunt T's ravaged body. The truth is that I no longer remember what she looked like, or what her voice sounded like, or anything about her beyond the scene of her death. 

The truth is, the only thing I really remember is the smell of her blood. Sticky and coagulating where it pooled on the table linen, where it soaked into the bow still tied neatly at the base of her torn-up throat. It was thick and coppery and dark, dark red. 

And I was so very, very hungry.


End file.
